Goodbye Uncle Tom

1971 time-travel mockumentary

Rating: 9/20

Plot: A pair of time-traveling documentary makers go back in time to investigate how Americans treated their slaves in the 19th Century. Spoiler: It wasn't very good.

"Thanks for closing your blind eye to a few transgressions I'm planning for tonight." That's the prayer of a slave owner as he's preparing for an evening of forced deflowering. That display of hypocrisy is probably the lone moment in this "shockumentary" that I thought was clever although the time-travel premise was an interesting idea.

This is a really ugly movie, probably appropriate since it's a well-researched and realistic look at a really ugly period in American history. There's a part of me who thinks it's probably not supposed to be entertaining at all. Another part, however, thinks they trying to make something that will be perversely and exploitatively entertaining. The set pieces are elaborate and grand, much more than you'd expect something with this much low-budget grime. But the filmmakers don't seem to know when to stop, and there are sequences that seem endless. I'd give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt and say that that's all part of some scheme, but I just don't see evidence that there's anything nuanced about this whole thing. Dopey music adds to this tacky tone. Shocking nudity, shocking violence, shocking humiliations. It adds up to something that sickens, but I had trouble understanding if I was supposed to be sickened by the history or by the filmmaking. Maybe it's both.

Attempts to implicate the audience in this whole thing also offended me. At the halfway point in the movie, it was almost like the director was telling me to go ahead and shut the movie off. I almost did, but I would have felt guilty about checking this off a list that I'm trying to complete.

I did almost like the ending with an angry black man reading Nat Turner quotes popping a poor white kid's beach ball. I have a hunch that that was supposed to be a more powerful ending than it ended up being. Maybe when all the beach balls are popped, this country can begin to heal from the damages done by slavery and racism.